MAKING IT POSSIBLE FOR EVERY 12-year-old to “log on to the Internet” is one of President Clinton’s main goals for the schools. The Democrats would be foolish to waste this occasion for another helpful, informative TV ad, so here is a suggested script:
SCENE; DOCTOR’S OFFICE
PATIENT:. Doc, I’ve got acute chest pains, my head is bursting, and I got hit by a truck on my way over. You’ve got to help me!
DOCTOR: Have an ice-cream cone. (Hands over a double-scoop of chocolate.)
PATIENT: But my brain is melting, my bones are cracking, my heart is falling out, I’m hemorrhaging, and you’re offering me — an ice-cream cone?
DOCTOR (puzzled): What’re you telling me, you don’t like ice-cream cones? (Aside) What kind of crazy extremist position is that?
VOICE-OVER (as patient dies and orderlies cart him out): This guy’s troubles are over. Reelect President Clinton and he’ll fix yours, too. Paid for by Americans Against Cancer-Gingrich, Muscular-Gingrich-Dystrophy, and MultipleGingrich-Sclerosis. Remember, your vote counts!
The president’s Internet proposal is absurd. Not because there is anything wrong in itself with Internet access for children, but because our schools are in crisis, and it is ludicrous to suppose that Internet access will fix or even address the main problems. We don’t have time or money to waste on quack cures, whether or not they are harmless; this patient needs help desperately.
A teacher explains in the fall “96 Public Interest why she quit the public schools to found a charter school of her own. “Public school was preventing education,” Sarah Kass writes. “Could he read? Could she write? Did he know how to calculate percentages? Did she understand the First Amendment?” No one cared, and she walked. We have been aware of this education crisis at least since the Nation At Risk report more than a decade ago. We have shrugged it off, and the consequences are upon us. The Doles, Bennetts, and Borks condemn the trashification of popular culture, but vulgarity is the consequence of ignorance, never mind Hollywood. Here is John McPhee on the entertainment industry in a California gold-rush town: “While you drink your tanglefoot whiskey, you can watch a dog kill a dog, a chicken kill a chicken, a man kill a man, a bull kill a bear.” An uneducated audience demands bear-baiting, rap music, movies awash in blood — whatever is convenient. Young people increasingly don’t read the newspapers or watch the news on TV — in part, granted, because the mainstream news outlets are full of cant. But it is also true that, always and everywhere, ignorant people care less about the world around them and are less capable of deciphering it than educated ones. What did we expect?
Our schools are in bad trouble. Almost no one denies it, left or right. The president has a plan, naturally, and Internet access is a big part of it. But is there a teacher, parent, principal, child, even teacher’s union bureaucrat anywhere in the country, anywhere in the world, who believes that our children are in educational trouble because they are data-deprived? Because they lack sufficient opportunities for chatting online? Because they can’t get enough pictures to satisfy them and lead visually impoverished lives? Because they find credit-card shopping by phone so inconvenient that they are driven to distraction and can’t concentrate on their homework?
I have used the Internet or its precursor nearly every day since the fall of 1982 and would be hard pressed without it. Nowadays I search for arcane data on the net, shop for books at a Web site, stay in touch electronically with people all over the world. It’s great, and every high-school graduate ought to know how to use it — should know how to drive too, for that matter, how to manage a bank account, apply for a job, and dance the rumba. But none of those skills ought to be treated as an academic topic at a time when (in a 1993 finding cited by Charles Sykes in Dumbing Down Our Kids) “80 million Americans are deficient in the basic reading and mathematical skills needed to perform rudimentary tasks in today’s society.”
Moreover, virtually everything the Internet is selling, our children already have too much of and are choking on. The Web is a wonderful source of raw data. But our children are barely able to handle the data they already have — the databases and computer CDs and videotapes at many public libraries, the newspapers they don’t read, the 24-hour news channels and C- SPANs they don’t watch, the old-fashioned books they ignore. Couldn’t we teach them to use what they’ve got before favoring them with three orders of magnitude more? Everyone knows what you do with the Web: You surf, sliding from site to site at the click of a mouse button. Exactly which problem will Web-surfing attack? Our children’s insufficient shallowness? Excessive attention spans? Unhealthy fixation on in-depth analysis? Stubborn unwillingness to push on to the next topic until they have mastered the last? We need less surfing in the schools, not more. The Web is a great source of pictures — are we trying to cure our children of excessive interest in the written word? Depraved indifference to glitz and snazzy graphics?
And yet computers stand at the center of the president’s schools program. ” I want to build a bridge to the 21st century,” he says, “where computers are as much a part of the classroom as blackboards.” Fine, and meanwhile a 1990 survey of college seniors found that 42 percent couldn’t date the Civil War correctly to within half a century.
“We should finish the job of connecting every classroom to the Internet by the year 2000,” says the president. All right, and meanwhile a late 1980s survey of high-school seniors found that fewer than half could define “profit” or “government budget deficit.”
Where education is concerned, the president’s whole worldview is loopy. The only thing crazier is the Dole campaign’s tactful near-silence on the topic.
Fact: The National Education Association and the Democratic party are bosom buddies and strong mutual supporters. Fact: The schools that NEA people run are in crisis and everyone knows it. Conclusion: The Democratic party relates to education the way bug zappers relate to mosquitoes. And yet in the public mind the Democrats are the education party.
Why didn’t Dole say any of the following during either debate? You figure it out:
* “You have argued repeatedly, Mr. President, that opposing the Department of Education is tantamount to opposing education. Is this the same Department of Education to which NEA officials referred (according to Charles Sykes), on the night before Jimmy Carter signed it into existence, in this toast? — ” Here’s to the only union that owns its own cabinet department”? Do you actually believe that the schools are better today than they were in the benighted pre-Education Department era? And what percentage of high-school students, do you think, could define ‘benighted,’ except by noting that it is the answer young Lancelot used to give when folks asked him “What do you want to do when you grow up?” Do you think federal bureaucrats will teach our children to read? I am in favor of education, Mr. President. I am also in favor of good software, sunny skies, and pretty girls, especially when they work for me. And does that mean, Sir, that I ought to favor cabinet departments of Software, Sunshine, and Paula Jones? What kind of idiots do you take us for?”
* “Like any other well-off person with half a brain, you, Sir, would sooner bludgeon yourself to death with a two-by-four than send your child to the D.C. public schools. So why did you oppose Congress’s effort to make private schooling available to poor D.C. residents? And you claim you are not the NEA’s devoted shill? What kind of fools do you think us, anyway? (Why, every man, woman, and child in this country knows that you have ‘I heart NEA’ tattooed in hot pink over your heart. That last charge is completely phony, of course — like your claim that Republicans tried to cut Medicare.)”
* “You keep telling us, Mr. President, that every 12-year-old ought to have access to the Internet. Now we understand, Sir (as you’ve said), that no attack ever created a job. That no insult ever cleaned up a toxicwaste dump. That no turnip ever taught Peter Jennings to dance the fandango. That no Kleenex ever talked a single American into blowing his nose. The nation thanks you humbly for pointing these things out. Just one more item: No glorified electronic shopping mall ever taught a child arithmetic or history, how to read and write English, or tell right from wrong. And those are the things our children need desperately to learn. Just how stupid, Mr. President, do you think we are?
“That stupid, huh.
“Sorry I asked.”
Contributing editor David Gelernter is professor of computer science at Yale University.
